


Corroded Wires

by jerseydevious



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, It's been a while, and Fuck David Cain, i think david cain should sit on a cactus, i'm just warming up to try and figure out how i wrote all these emo bitches, mostly a cass-flavored character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27947957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Cass asks questions, the way she needs to.
Relationships: Cassandra Cain & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 12
Kudos: 153





	Corroded Wires

**Author's Note:**

> HI it has been 557 years since I was last invested in comics, but I'm back in hell with you all now and providing some cold comforts for us all in the long winter of DC's ever-unimpressive quality. I'm trying (emphasis on trying) to nail down how I want to write and think about Cass, because it has always frustrated me how I never quite get the vibes I'm looking for, so I'm doing some warm-up-ish things like this to get back into the swing of things. It's, erm, going. 
> 
> Don't roast me too hard for this I'm basically a newbie all over again <3

The heater in the cave had given out just a few hours ago, and considering it was mid-November in a thick cold snap, Bruce had ducked beneath it the second he felt the abnormal cold licking up his spine. It had been working on frayed wires for a few weeks, but there hadn’t been a slow moment to give it a look, so every now and then he gave it a good kick and let it putter forward. He could have asked Tim to look at it, but truth be told, Bruce’s favorite kind of maintenance in the Batcave was the kind with wires and bolts and a solvable, tangible problem in front of him, and he was reluctant to give it up. But he hadn’t had time, until that early morning—the current interruption was unwelcome. It was seven in the morning and the sun was cresting over the trees and Bruce had finished maybe half of what he’d intended to. He indulged the interruption anyway.

Cass circled the edge of the mats, grinding her teeth against her mouthguard. She ought to have had headgear on, as well, maybe if she’d been anyone else—but the truth of the matter was that she didn’t really need either. Not because Bruce was good enough to trust himself, but because she was better, because if it were down to the wire, Bruce could never land a hit that would deal her any kind of damage even if he were trying. Sometimes he thought of the way she fought as the perfect meld of all their weaknesses—where Bruce was slower, she was faster, where Dick lacked endurance, she had it in spades, where Tim lacked power, she could deliver. There was no perfect fighter. There was no such thing as flawless. But if there were, Cass would have gotten there first.

Bruce gave them both a moment to breathe. He rolled his shoulder, aware of her dark eyes on him, waiting for his mark—he could shift his stance the slightest way, the barest indication of readiness, and she wouldn’t hesitate for a second. She would see it faster than anyone. After a moment, he did, just turned his shoulders slightly towards her and then brought his forearms together over his face to block the blow he knew was coming. It did, naturally, but that was just Cass saying _hello._

This—when she wandered to him early in the morning, exhausted after patrol, curious and hovering—was not sparring. It was slow, for one, too slow to be any kind of training, too slow to mimic what any kind of proficient fighter would dole out in the field, too slow to be the maintenance that their skillset required. It was something different but something she needed all the same, something Bruce could tell she needed because on these mornings she wandered to him with the skin on her fingers scrubbed off. Cass’s tendency to pick at her skin would be a nervous tic on anyone else in the world, but Cass was a lot of things, but she was always herself and she was never nervous. That was the confidence being the best afforded a person; Cass could walk into any room and know that nothing could touch her unless she let it, that if anyone wanted to throw a punch in her direction it was entirely up to her whether it landed. Nervous was not the word for it. Hate was—hate for her skin, the blood pumping beneath it, the body it belonged to and the person who piloted it. The word for it made him ache. He liked solvable puzzles. He liked mechanical parts. He wanted to gut and replace corroded wires, but corroded neural pathways, a lifetime of hell—it couldn’t be gutted. It couldn’t be replaced.

Cass offered a few other blows, pressed his defenses—he caught her knee with his palm and almost before he had a chance to react, she was lining up a hit to his side that would have leveled him. Instead she caught his elbow with her taped knuckles. If she hadn’t been holding back, she would’ve headbutted him in the face and then brought up her knee again; there was a thread of sarcasm in the way she fought. If she missed a strike, she would set the grounds to make that strike possible again, bring it full circle—but it wasn’t a fight, really, and she was relaxed. Smiling, even, just a small one, and it lessened the ache in his chest. The smile, too, was irreplaceable.

The key to striking against Cass was to feint so convincingly he himself almost believed he was going to follow through with the move until he pulled back at the last second. The only way to lie to her was to come so close to making it a reality that she would believe you—it was the one weakness of hers he’d ever managed to exploit quickly enough to drop her, but of course, Cass was formidable even on the ground, where Bruce’s weight ordinarily gave him an advantage. This morning he aimed for that—Cass’s tells were miniscule but he could see that her strikes were getting harder, that she was overcompensating for exhaustion with sheer force, and he wanted to draw it to a close—but failed, and Cass redirected the momentum of his throw against him. He hit the mat hard, taking the shock of the hit to the metal conundrum nestled in the middle of his back where Bane had snapped him like a toothpick years ago, and blinked up at her.

Her hair—it had fallen out of its ponytail somewhere in the early stages of the dance—obscured her face, a swath of dark, choppy feathering shuddering with the force of her breath. Bruce didn’t have to see her face to know she looked almost exactly like her mother, paralleled perfectly in their chins and jawlines and rounded eyes, the soft browline and the wide nose and the black, cautious eyes that Bruce found so unnerving to see in Lady Shiva. She didn’t look an ounce like David Cain. It was maybe the only kindness her blood had given her.

Her forearm was braced against his neck, rigid. “You’re always good,” Bruce worked out, when he had caught his breath, and Cass slackened, pulling her arm off his neck and leaning against the knee she had pressed against his chest.

Cass’s breath slowed down and she stood, shaking her hair out, and offered him her hand, calloused and lined by a thousand pale scars, some of which crawled beneath the tape, some of which crawled further up her arms. The ripped skin on her fingers wasn’t bleeding, but it wasn’t closed, either, shining beneath the fluorescent bulbs with clear fluid. She always offered him her hand, and he never took it, instead choosing to haul himself to his feet on his own. It was enough, for him, to lose. Bruce didn’t make a habit of leaning on anyone else after he’d lost. He could almost hear Clark laughing at him, low and soft, and offering some Clark-ism over a mug of coffee, _Bruce, hate to tell it, I really do. But I think you need more help after you lose, not less._

He pulled himself upright and then started unwrapping the tape from his knuckles. They were silent and he was comfortable in it, the silence, just their breathing and their breath billowing in the cold like dragon fire. Bruce took the wrap from her hands and balled it up, turned to toss it overhand to the benches that lined either wall of the training area, and then he turned back to her, poised to ask a gruff half-question about whether she’d eaten, and she had tears cutting down her cheeks. It felt, for a moment, like his blood had started running backwards.

“You,” she said, thickly. She growled in the back of her throat, eyes skittering everywhere except in his direction, gesturing her hands rapidly at her throat like she could pull the words out of her chest physically. She ran a hand through her choppy hair. “You,” she repeated, and then she found herself, squared her shoulders and stared at him in the eye. He’d been wrong about her. Cass didn’t have one strong moment, to make sense of it all—she had a hundred, a thousand strong moments a day. “You are never angry,” she said.

“Is there a reason I should be?” Bruce said, roughly.

“I win,” she said, “and you are not angry. You let me fight you. And you are not angry.”

“I’m not,” Bruce said, slowly—it would be easier, if he could draw conclusions from people. Hold his knowledge of them in his hands and rebuild it, reverse engineer childhoods from behavior. But the only evidence he had of Cass’ childhood were the strong moments, the steps she took to leave it behind. 

Cass’s fingers found a ridged scar on the side of her wrist, and picked at it, practically gouged it.. “Why,” she hissed.

Conversations like this made him feel slow and stupid, and he hated that, more than anything. There were connections he wasn’t making. Wires in the wrong socket. “Because you won,” he said, dully.

But to Cass those words seemed to hold importance, and she tilted her head, studying him like she found him as confusing then as he found her; strange, because if there was anyone he seemed to share a cloth with, it would have been Cass, for all their differences. Despite the gulf between them, if there were anyone he had to name who seemed to need that cape and cowl as much as he did, he would have named Cass.

Cass rolled up the hem of her black t-shirt, revealing the flat planes of her stomach, the scars carved into them. She tapped what would have been a gunshot wound, once upon a time—old, very old, the skin stretched as she’d grown, but a scar Bruce knew by heart. He had a fair share of his own. “He—got angry,” she said.

“Angry,” Bruce repeated, softly. It was loathsome and difficult, to keep his posture precisely relaxed, calm and collected when internally all he wanted was his hands wrapped around David Cain’s neck, when all he wanted was to press his thumbs into David Cain’s eyes until they gave a sickening pop. Keeping his temper in check around Cass pushed his self-control to the limit; every scar he saw on her, he had to pull himself back from thinking _I would grind his spine into dust,_ had to pull himself back from thinking that David Cain ought to lose every finger and then the hands altogether. Cass could read that fury on him. Sometimes it was good for her to see. Sometimes she needed the reminder that the thought of what David Cain had put his own daughter through, a child younger than eight years old, boiled Bruce’s blood, an outward confirmation for her that he was monstrous—one of Bruce’s litany of mistakes with Jason was that he had mastered that anger too well, that Jason had always bounced between justified fury at his parents, or thinking he had just been in the way. Wrong place, wrong time. It was Jason’s headstone that bore the weight of Bruce’s mistakes.

But he needed to smother that rage, when she was scrubbing tears off her face, when she was trying to speak. “I wait,” she said, stiffly, “for you to be angry—I try. You… do not. I could not win. He was angry when I lost. It was worse when I won.”

Bruce reached out and wrapped a careful hand around her wrist, the one viciously digging into her skin. “Don’t pick,” he said. “I’m sorry. Your father is evil.”

_Evil_ was not a good enough word. Bruce wasn’t exceptional with words.

Cass looked up at him, eyes watery and bright and bloodshot, red-rimmed and exhausted-looking. Bruce thought of the miserable way she must have wandered to him, the way she sought him out to test him—her burning question that if he were angry enough, would he hurt her? No one could touch Cass unless she let them. But the trying, if it had been Bruce who tried, would break her heart, enough that she had to know, study her variables, reverse engineer a man into a monster. Bruce’s heart thudded against his sternum. The ache had returned. _I can’t be this important to you,_ he wanted to say, because he thought of Jason and the weight in his arms that was unbearable, the weight on that headstone that was unbearable, and the talent he had for letting people down that was embedded in him.

“Not my father,” she said, and she was smiling, a tiny smile that shattered him. And then she wrapped her strong arms around him, and Bruce held her, and tried to pour every ounce of love into the embrace; tried to say _if it would make you smile for the briefest moment, I’d chop off an arm, I don’t know if what I have to give is worth giving, but consider it yours._

“Yeah,” he breathed into her hair. “Not your father.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! The detail of David shooting Cass when he was angry always fucking horrified me. 'Tis the season, though, for a little bit of trauma from me, the person who writes that in every season.


End file.
